Intro

Nationally, Hispanic populations report relatively high use of public transit compared with non-Hispanic white people. But in the central Puget Sound region, Census data shows that Hispanic workers tend to commute by transit roughly on par with their non-Hispanic white counterparts, and at substantially lower rates than other groups. We summarized the commute mode data available in the 2016-2021 Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) by race and Hispanic origin:

Source: 2016-2021 Census Public Use Microdata Sample

Additionally, Hispanic commuters drive to work at a higher rate than all other groups:

This led us to wonder what are the factors that inform these choices, and what are some of the pressures that lead the area’s Hispanic workers to favor cars over transit at higher rates than other populations.

Home Locations Make a Difference

First, we looked at the places that the Hispanic populace lives. Using Census data from the American Community Survey, we looked at the Hispanic population counts by tract. As shown in the map below, large concentrations of Hispanic populations are in South King County – notably Burien, Des Moines, Federal Way and Auburn – and Southern Snohomish County along the SR 99 Corridor.

To see how well commuters in these areas of high Hispanic concentrations are served by transit, we calculated the number of jobs accessible by transit within 45 minutes for each Census tract. This map, below, shows that the areas with best transit access to jobs are concentrated in central Seattle and Bellevue. Residents in these areas can reach a large pool of jobs by a 45-minute transit ride – nearly 800,000 for some tracts. By contrast, people living in the areas of high Hispanic populations can reach a much smaller pool by equivalent means: many can reach only between 30 and 60 thousand within the same 45-minute window. Residents of the tract with the single highest Hispanic population, in Auburn, have only 20,000 jobs accessible within this window And the fewer the jobs accessible by transit, the higher the likelihood that a given worker will need to drive to get to his or her place of work.

Industry

We wondered if another contributing factor to the relatively high rates of Hispanic drive commute trips might be a difference in the mix of industrial sectors among the different groups. To investigate this, we first summarized workers by the NAICS industry codes in Census PUMS data. For Hispanic workers, we saw that construction jobs constitute the largest individual sector, with 7 percent of workers. This was followed by Restaurants/Food Services (6.7 percent) and Elementary and Secondary Education (1.9 percent).

For non-Hispanic workers, the most common industries turned out to be roughly the same mix, but with different proportions: Construction was still the largest sector, although it was not quite as large a share, at 3.9 percent. Following this was Computer Systems Design (3.6 percent) and Restaurants/Food Services (3.5 percent).

The chart below displays the relative prominence of the four most-common industrial sectors, by race and ethnicity. Two sectors, Restaurants and Construction, clearly stand out as more prominent for Hispanic workers as compared with other groups.

The relatively high rate of construction jobs among Hispanic workers is likely to have some marginal effect on the high drive commute share for this group. As has been pointed out in the news media, construction workers are among the least likely to commute by transit, not least because the work often require tools or equipment to be carried to the job site. This is borne out in the Census PUMS data that we reviewed: only 2 percent of construction workers (of any race or ethnicity) commute by transit, whereas 87 percent drive to work. Other sectors have higher transit commute rates, as shown in this chart:

It should be noted however that as relatively large as this share is, construction jobs still account for only seven percent of Hispanic employment, and are likely to be only a contributing factor to this group’s high drive commute share. And within the Construction sector itself, Hispanic commuters still showed a somewhat higher drive commute share than did other groups,with 91 percent of their commutes being by car. The chart below illustrates this finding:

Similarly, Hispanic workers within the Construction industry appear to take transit to work at rates slightly lower than their Black and Asian counterparts. It should be noted that although the Hispanic bar in the chart below is noticeably lower than that for the two other groups, because of the high margin of error we cannot point to a significant difference between the groups here.